Hello, all!
I am taking a mini-holiday of sorts at the moment, as I’m currently visiting my grandfather in Greece! I am of course missing Lorenzo and my babies, but the warmer air here is doing absolute wonders for my fucked-up body, and I am spending time with my grandfather’s tubby little tabby, Kaluki and my uncle’s little dog Georgia.
Kaluki is naturally quite a timid cat but she’s become a lot more confident with me the past few years, so we’ve been playing string a lot, and she keeps sleeping in bed with me at night. She’s got a lovely layered winter coat on, so when you pet her she’s actually quite cool to the touch – it’s so funny how fucking inefficient our cats are at regulating their temperatures in much colder air versus Kaluki in Greece.
Georgia, meanwhile, is a little bundle of energy and is not optimised for the cold weather, so she keeps weaselling under the blankets with me, as she’s a big fan of how inefficient my body is at keeping in its own heat.
Thank you very much to the lovely moderators of /r/MM_RomanceBooks, and particularly to Bextress, for including me in their Moderator’s Choice Awards for 2025! Absolutely go and check out the whole list, as there are numerous wonderful authors and books featured.
I have been very much enjoying new episodes of The Pitt, which is coming out on Thursdays, and it’s really good, I’m enjoying it a lot. I’m also catching up on Chicago Med, which properly shows itself as truly garbage-tier television in comparison to genuinely well-written and wonderful work like The Pitt, so you may be seeing more Geordi Haas and Nick stuff, and then I’m actually watching episodes of ER from 1994 at the moment!
As a bitch who loves shitty medical dramas and has watched some other older ones like St Elsewhere, it’s great fun watching this one and seeing it playing on expected tropes of St Elsewhere and General Hospital, how music and stings are used in such an incredibly 90s fashion in order to pump up the tension. The references to ER in The Pitt and the callbacks are great fun, too, and seeing twinky little baby Noah Wyles contrasting with DILFY control issues Noah Wyles rocks.
I think I might want to play more with my hospital setting and do some more complicated stuff with Nick and Geordi, we shall see; I’m juggling a few other things while also working on Domesticating A Pig and Rescue Dogs.
I am enjoying The Pitt enough to have written a 6k Whitaker/Robby fic here, which is them having an anonymous Grindr hook-up pre-show.
I have organised my Ao3 a bit and started using the pseud function, so please don’t panic and think anything’s disappeared.
The vast majority of my fanfic is published under DictionaryWrites as usual, and then my original work and some of the public domain fanworks are now published under Johannes_T_Evans as a pseud of DictionaryWrites – it just adds a bit more organisation and ease of navigation and looks a bit neater and tidier.
I might write some more fic for The Pitt, but I’m not really sure – as hot as I find Robby, I’m not really horny about basically any of the other characters, and while I really enjoy the Mel/Frank dynamic, I don’t know that I enjoy it enough to write for it. It’s generally a sign of how rich I find a given piece of media, though, because it just means I’m not seeing gaps to fill in or aspects that I particularly want to change or twist around – I’m just really enjoying what’s being presented at face value, and I’m so excited with every new episode that comes out.
I am trying to focus on resting my body a bit while I’m here on Crete, but because I’m feeling so much better body-wise I likely will be writing a bit while I’m here. I have unfortunately run into an issue with my SECOND GP prescribing my testosterone, and because the advice and prescription from my Irish endocrinologist is respected more in Greece than it is in the UK, I’m just going to be getting my testosterone prescribed by my grandfather’s doctor for the foreseeable future.
Given that I have been trying to come out here twice a year anyway, it’s going to work out cheaper than signing up with any of the predatorily high-priced private HRT services that are popping up in the UK supposedly to bridge the gap between the NHS’ negligence and the political backlash towards trans medical care. This most recent thing was so anxiety-inducing and so frustrating, because when your medications are being messed with for political reasons rather than medical ones, you can’t even argue it, and the level of bureaucracy the decisions are disguised with is just exhausting.
I will be writing a letter to my MP and my local councillors when I get back to the UK, and maybe pitching a piece to the local newspaper, because obviously the exact same thing is happening to trans people across the country, with GPs refusing to follow shared care agreements or, as in my case, abruptly attempting to stop administration of medication to detransition random people, and it’s as asinine as it is infuriating.
My current GP has been a lot cleverer about withholding care and obfuscating the issue than my last GP, but that they were subtler about the bigotry and the process of it doesn’t make it less potentially dangerous for my health, and most people do not have the specific resources and supports that I do that enable me to sidestep the attempted abuse. What makes me angriest about it is that much as with the AIDs crisis, negligence and abuse by GPs like this will never be punished – in twenty years, they’ll look back on it and pretend they weren’t contributing to it whilst saying how many mistakes were made in patient care, and act like it was purely a systemic failing rather than personal professional choices contributing to the harm to patients.
Apart from the write-up of that, once I’m home I plan to write a non-fiction write-up of aids and adjustments I’ve made to my daily life and to the flat to make it more accessible and to ease life for me with pain and fatigue, which will hopefully be useful for people; I’m also working on my upcoming calendar for the year, figuring out where and when I’ll be travelling for conventions and other events, and that will be great fun, at least!
I have crosswords made and queued for February and April, and will be working on the March one soon so it’s queued up and finished well-in-advance – and for those of you who are creators, my monthly Trans Creator Boost and Disabled Creator Boost for January are now both live on Bluesky, and going forth will go up on the 1st and 15th of the month each month.
Hope everybody’s having a lovely January!
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